Set up the personal cloud service

One cool and practical project you can do on an Orange Pi or a Raspberry Pi is to set up a free, personal and “on-premise” version of Dropbox. This will allow you, among other things, to share files between your different devices. Additionally, you can automatically upload any new pictures from your phone to the cloud storage. In this tutorial you will learn to install the private cloud server software, configure it and sync files from a mobile device. I tested these steps on the Orange Pi and I assume this will also work on the Raspberry Pi. We will store the data on and external device, like a USB flash drive or external HDD, connected to the Orange Pi.

Store sensor data with SQLite

Very often as part of an Orange Pi or Raspberry Pi project involving sensors, it is useful to store the sensor data in some kind of way or another. A good way to store the data is in a database that you can manage and query. SQLite is a popular embedded database management system. SQLite comes in the form of a C library. Due to it’s low footprint on resources, it fits well with a device such as a Raspberry Pi or the Orange Pi.

Install MySQL and set up a database

In this post I will show you how to install MySQL sever on the Raspberry Pi or on an Orange Pi Plus 2e. Furthermore I will show you how to read and write data from Python to a MySQL database using SQLAlchemy.